Interview with Jessie H. Oppenheimer, 1998.

THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: San Antonio & HemisFair
INTERVIEW WITH: Jesse H. Oppenheimer (Tape 1 of 1)
DATE: 7 April 1998
PLACE: Mr. Oppenheimer’s office.
INTERVIEWER: Sterlin Holmesly
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
H: Interview with Jesse H. Oppenheimer, April 7, 1998, in his office, this is Sterlin Holmesly.
O: My name is Jesse H. Oppenheimer, I’m a lawyer in San Antonio. I’m now seventy-nine years old. I was born and raised here, as were both of my parents. My father was raised on the corner of Pecan and Jefferson. My mother was raised in a home known as the Halff House, which is still located in HemisFair. So I’m third generation on both sides. Both of my grandfathers settled in San Antonio. I’ve always had a strong community involvement. The reason for this interview, as I understand it, has to do with the change in ownership of the Express Publishing Company and the events that led up to it, all of which I think has a great amount of interest.
It all started in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when I was appointed to the board of what was then called the Robert B. Green Hospital, which is now the Bexar County Hospital District. I think it may have been called that then. I think that was an appointment by the Bexar County Jesse Oppenheimer 2
O: Commissioners. At that time Robert Tobin was elected chairman of the board and so we always referred to that – to the board - as “The Tobin Board” because it was so closely identified with him. While I served on this board, the question of a medical school for this area arose. And due to the strenuous efforts of some very good citizens, it was finally determined that if a site could be selected that was satisfactory that a medical school would be located in San Antonio. At that time, because it would be a teaching facility, all medical schools are attached to what is called a “teaching hospital.” And it was obvious at the time that the Robert B. Green in its then posture was not probably large enough or adequate to be that teaching hospital. And it would also require the addition of facilities in order to make it come up to standards. The entire governing board of the hospital district upon which I served unanimously believed that the medical school and related facilities should be located where the Robert B. Green is and in that area. The...all medical schools that having teaching hospitals rely to a great extent on charity cases, public cases, and in order to teach the students, the interns and the residents. And you have to have a very large population in a hospital in order to afford this – these teaching advantages which are necessary to any medical school. At that time, as I said, the board of the Green was unanimous that that school and its related facilities should be in theJesse Oppenheimer 3
O: downtown area and adjacent to the Robert B. Green. At the time Winston Martin was head of Urban Renewal, and I knew his input would be valuable. But we were told, or informed that land could be obtained through urban renewal for the location of the medical school and all of its supporting facilities. There was a large group of downtown merchants, headed principally by Pat Zachry who also believed strongly that the facility should be downtown.
H: Well, let me interject.
O: Yes.
H: Pat Zachry was H.B. Zachry, head of H.B. Zachry Construction Company.
O: That is correct. And he had one meeting. At one time the opponents of the – what we then called “the country club location,” ‘cause Oak Hills was situated out there - at one meeting I witnessed he raised a million dollars in pledges in about an hour in order to buy more land that was needed in excess of what Urban Renewal could supply. Now looking at the other side of coin, the group of developers headed by Edgar von Shield and McCreless and a group of others had purchased for a fairly nominal amount the large area, quite a few hundred acres, where the medical school is now situated. At the same time another force that militated in that direction was that the Methodist Hospital had been created through the efforts of Sid Katz and others, and so you had an existing suburban hospital located out there. SoJesse Oppenheimer 4
O: you had a combination of the developers and the proponents and the supporters of the Methodist Hospital that wanted to build the medical school and related facilities out where it’s presently located. The developers did a very clever thing - it’s done often by developers. When developers buy some land, they often donate some certain portions of it for school or for a church, and that sort of thing makes their land more valuable and also it complies with the public needs. This was what was done pretty much with the Medical Center. If you can visualize a doughnut, the developers transferred the hole in the doughnut to what was then called the, I believe, The San Antonio Medical Foundation. And of course they retained the doughnut which was the bulk of the land out there and which they could later – which they bought by the acre but later could sell by the square foot. They formed a very fine group of people to head this foundation - Jim Hollers, a political dentist became very large in that group, later became head of it. And their function with this acreage – I think it was around two hundred acres – out of the heart of this land that they had bought, their function was to see to it that politically they were able to prevail on having the medical school and other public facilities placed on that two hundred acres, which was, as I say, the hole in the doughnut. This would of course tremendously enhance the value of the remaining land, which it has. And which has been highly successful asJesse Oppenheimer 5
O: a real estate development. What happened then was that we had this struggle going on between the board of the Green or the hospital district and these downtown oriented people against the developers and the key people with the Methodist Hospital. And of course we weren’t getting paid anything, we were...considered ourselves working as volunteers for the public. And although we did our best, I don’t imagine we did it twenty-four hours a day. And they would send in these committees and commissions to make studies of the relative merits of the two locations, and we would see Jim Hollors and others entertaining with these people on various occasions including at the San Antonio Country Club. To tie in the Express Publishing Company which is a...something that is rather unusual. Merton Minter was then...who was one of the outstanding internists in San Antonio was the guru for the general practioners out at the Methodist Hospital. And for some reason or other and I don’t know just how it happened, he became extremely interested in having the medical school out where it’s presently located. He also, and this was the key, was on the board of regents of the University of Texas. He might have later become chairman, I’m not sure of that.
H: At this time the Methodist was just sitting by itself in this pastureland.
O: That’s correct. It was a rural hospital, outlying hospital, to service the needs of the northern part of San Jesse Oppenheimer 6
O: Antonio. Merton Minter’s wife – I think her name was Rena - was the sister of Frank Huntress Jr., and Frank Huntress ran the Express Publishing Company. Through that connection, and I believe that must have had a lot to do with it, the Express Publishing Company through its newspapers which was then The Express and The Evening News, became deeply involved and aggressively involved in seeing to it that the medical school and its supporting facilities and the new county hospital were to be built out at what we considered the “country club site” or the developers’ location.
H: Is this still the late ‘50s?
O: This was in the very late ‘50s and early ‘60s – ’60,61. So the paper went on a vicious campaign to see to it that the medical school and the hospital were built in that location. At that time there was a columnist on the front page, left side, by the name of Paul Thompson. And although the trustees of the Bexar County Hospital District were unanimously in favor of the downtown location, and they had no motivation, no monetary motivation, except what they thought was good for the community, and putting the charity hospital closer to the charity cases which were mainly on the west side of San Antonio. And Paul Thompson then began running column after column after column about the Robert B. Green board and it was many...in many instances it was exaggerations to say the least, and lies to say the most.Jesse Oppenheimer 7
O: Slowly, as our terms expired, we were replaced on that board by people sympathetic with the north-side site. The first person as I remember that replaced...the first person that expired was a Dr. Walthall, and he was then one person out of I think seven or nine whatever the board was. And we used to get a kick out of Paul Thompson – he called the other nine – or the other eight – a “clique.” And the one person he treated like they were the majority, he always called the eight to one – he would call the eight a clique. It may have been six to one – I forget whether the board was seven or whether it was nine. But anyway, at that point I became rather enraged, and I’m a cause person anyway – I go off on tangents when I see some injustice. Ad I knew from history and my general knowledge, that the Express Publishing Company control rested with the Brackenridge Estate. I also knew that the Brackenridge Estate had done little or nothing for charity in our community. The Brackenridge is set up as a charitable trust for educational purposes. Ad it had been attacked back in the ‘20s or the ‘30s...it had been attacked poorly – I think Bill Church, an older lawyer here had something to do with it - and they lost the battle, and so it continued. It has to be understood how the Express Publishing Company was owned. It was owned twenty-eight percent by the Huntresses personally; it was owned thirty-three and a third percent by the Brackenridge Charitable Trust; and it also was owned, theJesse Oppenheimer 8
O: balance by what we used to refer to as the Grice heirs – G-r-i-c-e heirs – who lived in Chicago. And they had received little or no dividends and little or no recognition of their ownership because they were minority shareholders, and they were trying to sell their stock, which I’ll get back to later. The Huntresses along with Leroy Denman, and a man by the name of McDaniels that worked with the Huntresses, and two Huntresses were the trustees of the Brackenridge Trust. And by the ownership of the thirty-three and a third percent in the trust, and their ability to vote that stock and the twenty-eight percent that they owned individually, they were able to control the company, the corporation. And I have in my possession many of the minutes of their meetings and also many of their financial statements over the years. Actually Brackenridge died around 1919, I believe. His will was probated, I think, 1920 – 1921. And during that entire period, little or nothing had been given to charity, and what had happened was that the Huntresses who they along with their supporters, including McDaniels and Denman, were able to vote the stock in such a way as to make themselves directors of the corporation. And as directors of the corporation they elected themselves as officers. So here we had a three tiered layer cake of them as trustees of a charitable trust electing themselves directors of the corporation, electing themselves as officers, and doing little or nothing forJesse Oppenheimer 9
O: charity, according to Mr. Brackenridge’s wishes. As a matter of fact, their first tax exemption from the Internal Revenue Service was not obtained until 1962.
H: Forty years later.
O: Not four years later...
H: Forty.
O: Yes. He died in about ’19. They didn’t even have tax exemption. Now interestingly enough, and this is something that would have to be checked, years ago, and this is just a side issue, they, the Huntresses, decided that there ought to be some memorial in Brackenridge Park to Mr. Rackenridge who had given the park to the community. And they wanted to set up a bronze figure of him, which I think is there today. So they went around San Antonio and got the school children to collect pennies to get up enough money to go out and buy this bust of Mr. Brackenridge, which we always thought had been such a benefactor of the Huntresses that it wouldn’t have hurt the Huntresses to have possibly paid for this bust. But at any rate, these grimey little fingers of all the school children brought in the pennies. And they had a fund called “The Brackenridge Memorial Fund” and I think it may have gotten a tax exemption. And people used to think that that was the big trust which was left under Mr. Brackenridge’s will, but it was a decoy. And the trust did not get its exemption until 1962. In the meantime, and this is where the cheese gets more binding, the Huntresses, inJesse Oppenheimer 10
O: addition to preserving themselves as directors and paid officers of the corporation, they knew that anything the corporation did in the way of expansion and growth would enhance and improve the value of their twenty-eight percent minority interest. So they voted their twenty-eight percent interest, plus the thirty-three and a third percent interest towards the acquisition of outside activities, such as radio stations, television station, an air service to the Valley, a DC-3, which they used to ride around in, land. In other words they ploughed back the earnings of the Express Publishing Company, such as they were, into these acquisitions, which in turn ploughed Mr. Brackenridge’s funds as well. And so that in effect their earnings that flowed through to the trust were minimal at best. And they had not made any substantial contributions, except token amounts at the time that I became aware of it in 1961 and 1962. And Mr. Brackenridge had died I think in 1919. So I made an investigation. I decided that the only way to fight this thing was to fight it at the level of the Brackenridge Trust. So I dug into Mr. Brackenridge’s will and his probate. And there was a man in town who was one of my closest friends and dearest friends by the name of B.F. Pittman. And he was in the investment banking – of financing, financial business - and he represented... The Grice heirs had come to him and said that they wanted to sell their stock. And he got hold of Mr. Houston Harte Sr. Jesse Oppenheimer 11
O: who had the San Angelo Times and the Caller down in Corpus asked him did he want to buy their stock. And Mr. Harte said yes he did and he bought the stock at four thousand dollars per share. So he now – Harte-Hanks – it was the Hanks family represented by Bruce Meador – M-e-a-d-o-r – and the Harte family represented by Mr. Houston Harte. They then owned the Grice heirs’ interest in the Express, but it was a minority interest. So they would come down here and go to meetings and things, but they had no say over what the corporation did because again Huntress - through the Brackenridge Estate and their own ownership - controlled the company. So they were not very courteous or very understanding of Mr. Harte, who came in like a stranger. So at that point the Harte-Hanks interest did own an interest in the Express Publishing Company. The...I went up and looked into this – their positions with the company - and I got certain information from Ben Pittman who had information from the Grice heirs. And I studied this information and found that to my disdain that it was all negative from the viewpoint of the Denman and the Huntresses, because what they were doing was use this charitable trust for their own selfish purposes. They also had fairly large, and as I remember, non-interest bearing accounts with the San Antonio Bank and Trust which was controlled by the Denman family. So I...then after I’d studied this thing, I wrote a memorandum which was about twenty pages on their conflict ofJesse Oppenheimer 12
O: interest and how they had to either sell the Express Publishing Company stock or they had to resign as trustees – they couldn’t do both, because they were looking over their own shoulder and looking over their shoulder twice.
H: To whom did this memo go?
O: I then...it went...finally I sent it to Mr. Will Wilson who was the attorney general. And the reason I did that is because under the law of the State of Texas, the attorney general is the only person who is charged by law with the enforcement of charitable trusts. And so I could not do anything as a private citizen. But Will Wilson, the attorney general serving, at the time was charged...it was his duty to enforce charitable trusts. So I sent this information to Will Wilson and told him that I thought this was a situation he ought to look into, which he did. And he was extremely cooperative, and he agreed with us a hundred percent that this was serious abuses...serious abuses were at hand and that he would do something about it. In fact they drafted a petition...they drafted a petition against the Huntresses asking them to resign and charging them with various malfeasance. At that point Leroy Denmam got hold of me and said that they had solved everything; they had sold all the Brackenridge stock to a paper supply house that they dealt closely with called The Hennipen Paper Company. And they’d solved everything. And I asked him how much they had received, and he said four thousand dollars a share. And IJesse Oppenheimer 13
O: remarked that that was quite strange because we had an offer on the table at ten thousand dollars a share. And he said it was a done deal. And I said, “Well, we’re going to have to undone it because they were taking six thousand dollars a share out of the Brackenridge Trust – just like stealing it. And so, to our surprise, in about day or two that deal was called off.
H: Well, let me back up just a minute. Were you retained by Harte-Hanks at that time?
O: No, I was not paid anything at that time.
H: Okay. And who was the ten thousand dollar a share offer from?
O: Harte-Hanks.
H: Okay. So they’d up their...the original was four thousand a share and...
O: To the Grice heirs.
H: Yeah. And then the next was ten thousand.
O: Ten thousand.
H: Okay.
O: And they also told the attorney general who wanted to know the value of the shares that they were worth ten thousand dollars a share. And I have telegrams to the attorney general and copies to me stating that they would pay then thousand dollars a share. So in effect, by the sale to Hennipen, there was a withdrawal or waste of six thousand dollars a share of the Brackenridge stock and wouldJesse Oppenheimer 14
O: have reduced the corpus of the Brackenridge Charitable Trust by sixty percent.
H: How many shares were involved in the trust? Do you recall?
O: I would have to check my file...
H: About.
O: It could have been three hundred and thirty-three and a third – something of that type. But I think there were a thousand shares outstanding. I think...I can check a file if you want to turn this off.
H: That’s okay.
O: All right. So anyway...so they called off that sale and Harte offered them ten thousand dollars a share for the Brackenridge Trust stock. And they sold it to him, and they then offered them their stock – their twenty-eight percent -at ten thousand dollars a share, and he bought it. So at that point Harte-Hanks became one hundred percent owners of the Express Publishing Company, because they had bought the Grice heirs’ block, they had bought the Brackenridge Charitable Trust block. And they later bought out the Huntresses, which the Huntresses really were smart to do ‘cause then they would have then been the minority twenty-eight percent because Harte would have controlled through his thirty-three and a third percent of Brackenridge and he would have controlled the Grice shares. So twenty-eightJesse Oppenheimer 15
O: percent would have been...the thing would have swung over to where the Huntresses...
H: Yeah, just the reverse.
O: ...were the minority.
H: Yeah.
O: So they wanted to get out, and they sold out. And before they sold out, or right after they sold out, both Huntresses resigned as board members of the trust, of the charitable trust.
H: And that was Frank Jr. and then...?
O: And his father, and his son.
H: Sons – Fritzi.
O: Yeah. The old man, I think, had died by then – the real old man.
H: Yes.
O: Who was my father’s age.
H: Yeah.
O: They resigned because they had no longer any motivation to be on this trust. And so I think Gilbert Denman and I have a record, and maybe McDaniels stayed on, I think. But then it was Leroy, Gilbert, McDaniels, and I forget – one other person who I have a record of here, that we can supplement any of this information.
H: And then what happened to the trust?
O: The trust has continued. It is now one of our community trusts. It...in the...if you look in theJesse Oppenheimer 16
O: Directory of Texas Foundations, on page fourteen of the sixteenth edition, 1996 – 1997, it shows assets nineteen million, two forty-two, four ten; income eight forty-nine thousand, four ninety-one; grants six hundred and seventy-five thousand nine thirty-five. It shows the trustees: Gilbert Denman, trustee; Leroy Denman, trustee; J.B. McDaniels Jr., trustees - so I guess he’s still a trustee - and John H. Moore, trustee. I don’t know who he is, but he may be connected in some way.
H: But it’s still in...
O: So it’s still in existence.
H: Well, it’s doing significantly more charitable distributions than it did in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
O: I would certainly hope so. [laughter]
H: Yeah. [laughter] Great.
O: I mean, now is evidently... However it’s still controlled by the same – the Denman family - because they have several of these charitable trusts that they like to control, such as this and, you know, the big one – the Halsell Trust and so forth.
H: As I recall, and I was in San Antonio at the time Harte-Hanks took control of the Express Publishing Company in the summer of 1962...
O: I think that’s about right; I don’t remember the...
H: I remember the sale was announced in June, and I think by August they’d taken it over.Jesse Oppenheimer 17
O: That could be. The offers were in ’62, and I presume that it was closed soon thereafter. I have some papers on that.
H: Yeah. I remember being delighted by the change in ownership.
O: These telegrams are dated in February of ’62, so I’ll presume that ’62 was the year that most of these were closed.
H: Yeah, it was.
O: At that time, when this telegram of offer was sent, the trustees were Frank G. Huntress Jr. and Frank G. Huntress the third, Leroy Denman and John B. McDaniel Jr. were the trustees.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 1
TAPE 1, SIDE 2
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THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
Oral History Office
SUBJECT: San Antonio & HemisFair
INTERVIEW WITH: Jesse H. Oppenheimer (Tape 1 of 1)
DATE: 7 April 1998
PLACE: Mr. Oppenheimer’s office.
INTERVIEWER: Sterlin Holmesly
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
H: Interview with Jesse H. Oppenheimer, April 7, 1998, in his office, this is Sterlin Holmesly.
O: My name is Jesse H. Oppenheimer, I’m a lawyer in San Antonio. I’m now seventy-nine years old. I was born and raised here, as were both of my parents. My father was raised on the corner of Pecan and Jefferson. My mother was raised in a home known as the Halff House, which is still located in HemisFair. So I’m third generation on both sides. Both of my grandfathers settled in San Antonio. I’ve always had a strong community involvement. The reason for this interview, as I understand it, has to do with the change in ownership of the Express Publishing Company and the events that led up to it, all of which I think has a great amount of interest.
It all started in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when I was appointed to the board of what was then called the Robert B. Green Hospital, which is now the Bexar County Hospital District. I think it may have been called that then. I think that was an appointment by the Bexar County Jesse Oppenheimer 2
O: Commissioners. At that time Robert Tobin was elected chairman of the board and so we always referred to that – to the board - as “The Tobin Board” because it was so closely identified with him. While I served on this board, the question of a medical school for this area arose. And due to the strenuous efforts of some very good citizens, it was finally determined that if a site could be selected that was satisfactory that a medical school would be located in San Antonio. At that time, because it would be a teaching facility, all medical schools are attached to what is called a “teaching hospital.” And it was obvious at the time that the Robert B. Green in its then posture was not probably large enough or adequate to be that teaching hospital. And it would also require the addition of facilities in order to make it come up to standards. The entire governing board of the hospital district upon which I served unanimously believed that the medical school and related facilities should be located where the Robert B. Green is and in that area. The...all medical schools that having teaching hospitals rely to a great extent on charity cases, public cases, and in order to teach the students, the interns and the residents. And you have to have a very large population in a hospital in order to afford this – these teaching advantages which are necessary to any medical school. At that time, as I said, the board of the Green was unanimous that that school and its related facilities should be in theJesse Oppenheimer 3
O: downtown area and adjacent to the Robert B. Green. At the time Winston Martin was head of Urban Renewal, and I knew his input would be valuable. But we were told, or informed that land could be obtained through urban renewal for the location of the medical school and all of its supporting facilities. There was a large group of downtown merchants, headed principally by Pat Zachry who also believed strongly that the facility should be downtown.
H: Well, let me interject.
O: Yes.
H: Pat Zachry was H.B. Zachry, head of H.B. Zachry Construction Company.
O: That is correct. And he had one meeting. At one time the opponents of the – what we then called “the country club location,” ‘cause Oak Hills was situated out there - at one meeting I witnessed he raised a million dollars in pledges in about an hour in order to buy more land that was needed in excess of what Urban Renewal could supply. Now looking at the other side of coin, the group of developers headed by Edgar von Shield and McCreless and a group of others had purchased for a fairly nominal amount the large area, quite a few hundred acres, where the medical school is now situated. At the same time another force that militated in that direction was that the Methodist Hospital had been created through the efforts of Sid Katz and others, and so you had an existing suburban hospital located out there. SoJesse Oppenheimer 4
O: you had a combination of the developers and the proponents and the supporters of the Methodist Hospital that wanted to build the medical school and related facilities out where it’s presently located. The developers did a very clever thing - it’s done often by developers. When developers buy some land, they often donate some certain portions of it for school or for a church, and that sort of thing makes their land more valuable and also it complies with the public needs. This was what was done pretty much with the Medical Center. If you can visualize a doughnut, the developers transferred the hole in the doughnut to what was then called the, I believe, The San Antonio Medical Foundation. And of course they retained the doughnut which was the bulk of the land out there and which they could later – which they bought by the acre but later could sell by the square foot. They formed a very fine group of people to head this foundation - Jim Hollers, a political dentist became very large in that group, later became head of it. And their function with this acreage – I think it was around two hundred acres – out of the heart of this land that they had bought, their function was to see to it that politically they were able to prevail on having the medical school and other public facilities placed on that two hundred acres, which was, as I say, the hole in the doughnut. This would of course tremendously enhance the value of the remaining land, which it has. And which has been highly successful asJesse Oppenheimer 5
O: a real estate development. What happened then was that we had this struggle going on between the board of the Green or the hospital district and these downtown oriented people against the developers and the key people with the Methodist Hospital. And of course we weren’t getting paid anything, we were...considered ourselves working as volunteers for the public. And although we did our best, I don’t imagine we did it twenty-four hours a day. And they would send in these committees and commissions to make studies of the relative merits of the two locations, and we would see Jim Hollors and others entertaining with these people on various occasions including at the San Antonio Country Club. To tie in the Express Publishing Company which is a...something that is rather unusual. Merton Minter was then...who was one of the outstanding internists in San Antonio was the guru for the general practioners out at the Methodist Hospital. And for some reason or other and I don’t know just how it happened, he became extremely interested in having the medical school out where it’s presently located. He also, and this was the key, was on the board of regents of the University of Texas. He might have later become chairman, I’m not sure of that.
H: At this time the Methodist was just sitting by itself in this pastureland.
O: That’s correct. It was a rural hospital, outlying hospital, to service the needs of the northern part of San Jesse Oppenheimer 6
O: Antonio. Merton Minter’s wife – I think her name was Rena - was the sister of Frank Huntress Jr., and Frank Huntress ran the Express Publishing Company. Through that connection, and I believe that must have had a lot to do with it, the Express Publishing Company through its newspapers which was then The Express and The Evening News, became deeply involved and aggressively involved in seeing to it that the medical school and its supporting facilities and the new county hospital were to be built out at what we considered the “country club site” or the developers’ location.
H: Is this still the late ‘50s?
O: This was in the very late ‘50s and early ‘60s – ’60,61. So the paper went on a vicious campaign to see to it that the medical school and the hospital were built in that location. At that time there was a columnist on the front page, left side, by the name of Paul Thompson. And although the trustees of the Bexar County Hospital District were unanimously in favor of the downtown location, and they had no motivation, no monetary motivation, except what they thought was good for the community, and putting the charity hospital closer to the charity cases which were mainly on the west side of San Antonio. And Paul Thompson then began running column after column after column about the Robert B. Green board and it was many...in many instances it was exaggerations to say the least, and lies to say the most.Jesse Oppenheimer 7
O: Slowly, as our terms expired, we were replaced on that board by people sympathetic with the north-side site. The first person as I remember that replaced...the first person that expired was a Dr. Walthall, and he was then one person out of I think seven or nine whatever the board was. And we used to get a kick out of Paul Thompson – he called the other nine – or the other eight – a “clique.” And the one person he treated like they were the majority, he always called the eight to one – he would call the eight a clique. It may have been six to one – I forget whether the board was seven or whether it was nine. But anyway, at that point I became rather enraged, and I’m a cause person anyway – I go off on tangents when I see some injustice. Ad I knew from history and my general knowledge, that the Express Publishing Company control rested with the Brackenridge Estate. I also knew that the Brackenridge Estate had done little or nothing for charity in our community. The Brackenridge is set up as a charitable trust for educational purposes. Ad it had been attacked back in the ‘20s or the ‘30s...it had been attacked poorly – I think Bill Church, an older lawyer here had something to do with it - and they lost the battle, and so it continued. It has to be understood how the Express Publishing Company was owned. It was owned twenty-eight percent by the Huntresses personally; it was owned thirty-three and a third percent by the Brackenridge Charitable Trust; and it also was owned, theJesse Oppenheimer 8
O: balance by what we used to refer to as the Grice heirs – G-r-i-c-e heirs – who lived in Chicago. And they had received little or no dividends and little or no recognition of their ownership because they were minority shareholders, and they were trying to sell their stock, which I’ll get back to later. The Huntresses along with Leroy Denman, and a man by the name of McDaniels that worked with the Huntresses, and two Huntresses were the trustees of the Brackenridge Trust. And by the ownership of the thirty-three and a third percent in the trust, and their ability to vote that stock and the twenty-eight percent that they owned individually, they were able to control the company, the corporation. And I have in my possession many of the minutes of their meetings and also many of their financial statements over the years. Actually Brackenridge died around 1919, I believe. His will was probated, I think, 1920 – 1921. And during that entire period, little or nothing had been given to charity, and what had happened was that the Huntresses who they along with their supporters, including McDaniels and Denman, were able to vote the stock in such a way as to make themselves directors of the corporation. And as directors of the corporation they elected themselves as officers. So here we had a three tiered layer cake of them as trustees of a charitable trust electing themselves directors of the corporation, electing themselves as officers, and doing little or nothing forJesse Oppenheimer 9
O: charity, according to Mr. Brackenridge’s wishes. As a matter of fact, their first tax exemption from the Internal Revenue Service was not obtained until 1962.
H: Forty years later.
O: Not four years later...
H: Forty.
O: Yes. He died in about ’19. They didn’t even have tax exemption. Now interestingly enough, and this is something that would have to be checked, years ago, and this is just a side issue, they, the Huntresses, decided that there ought to be some memorial in Brackenridge Park to Mr. Rackenridge who had given the park to the community. And they wanted to set up a bronze figure of him, which I think is there today. So they went around San Antonio and got the school children to collect pennies to get up enough money to go out and buy this bust of Mr. Brackenridge, which we always thought had been such a benefactor of the Huntresses that it wouldn’t have hurt the Huntresses to have possibly paid for this bust. But at any rate, these grimey little fingers of all the school children brought in the pennies. And they had a fund called “The Brackenridge Memorial Fund” and I think it may have gotten a tax exemption. And people used to think that that was the big trust which was left under Mr. Brackenridge’s will, but it was a decoy. And the trust did not get its exemption until 1962. In the meantime, and this is where the cheese gets more binding, the Huntresses, inJesse Oppenheimer 10
O: addition to preserving themselves as directors and paid officers of the corporation, they knew that anything the corporation did in the way of expansion and growth would enhance and improve the value of their twenty-eight percent minority interest. So they voted their twenty-eight percent interest, plus the thirty-three and a third percent interest towards the acquisition of outside activities, such as radio stations, television station, an air service to the Valley, a DC-3, which they used to ride around in, land. In other words they ploughed back the earnings of the Express Publishing Company, such as they were, into these acquisitions, which in turn ploughed Mr. Brackenridge’s funds as well. And so that in effect their earnings that flowed through to the trust were minimal at best. And they had not made any substantial contributions, except token amounts at the time that I became aware of it in 1961 and 1962. And Mr. Brackenridge had died I think in 1919. So I made an investigation. I decided that the only way to fight this thing was to fight it at the level of the Brackenridge Trust. So I dug into Mr. Brackenridge’s will and his probate. And there was a man in town who was one of my closest friends and dearest friends by the name of B.F. Pittman. And he was in the investment banking – of financing, financial business - and he represented... The Grice heirs had come to him and said that they wanted to sell their stock. And he got hold of Mr. Houston Harte Sr. Jesse Oppenheimer 11
O: who had the San Angelo Times and the Caller down in Corpus asked him did he want to buy their stock. And Mr. Harte said yes he did and he bought the stock at four thousand dollars per share. So he now – Harte-Hanks – it was the Hanks family represented by Bruce Meador – M-e-a-d-o-r – and the Harte family represented by Mr. Houston Harte. They then owned the Grice heirs’ interest in the Express, but it was a minority interest. So they would come down here and go to meetings and things, but they had no say over what the corporation did because again Huntress - through the Brackenridge Estate and their own ownership - controlled the company. So they were not very courteous or very understanding of Mr. Harte, who came in like a stranger. So at that point the Harte-Hanks interest did own an interest in the Express Publishing Company. The...I went up and looked into this – their positions with the company - and I got certain information from Ben Pittman who had information from the Grice heirs. And I studied this information and found that to my disdain that it was all negative from the viewpoint of the Denman and the Huntresses, because what they were doing was use this charitable trust for their own selfish purposes. They also had fairly large, and as I remember, non-interest bearing accounts with the San Antonio Bank and Trust which was controlled by the Denman family. So I...then after I’d studied this thing, I wrote a memorandum which was about twenty pages on their conflict ofJesse Oppenheimer 12
O: interest and how they had to either sell the Express Publishing Company stock or they had to resign as trustees – they couldn’t do both, because they were looking over their own shoulder and looking over their shoulder twice.
H: To whom did this memo go?
O: I then...it went...finally I sent it to Mr. Will Wilson who was the attorney general. And the reason I did that is because under the law of the State of Texas, the attorney general is the only person who is charged by law with the enforcement of charitable trusts. And so I could not do anything as a private citizen. But Will Wilson, the attorney general serving, at the time was charged...it was his duty to enforce charitable trusts. So I sent this information to Will Wilson and told him that I thought this was a situation he ought to look into, which he did. And he was extremely cooperative, and he agreed with us a hundred percent that this was serious abuses...serious abuses were at hand and that he would do something about it. In fact they drafted a petition...they drafted a petition against the Huntresses asking them to resign and charging them with various malfeasance. At that point Leroy Denmam got hold of me and said that they had solved everything; they had sold all the Brackenridge stock to a paper supply house that they dealt closely with called The Hennipen Paper Company. And they’d solved everything. And I asked him how much they had received, and he said four thousand dollars a share. And IJesse Oppenheimer 13
O: remarked that that was quite strange because we had an offer on the table at ten thousand dollars a share. And he said it was a done deal. And I said, “Well, we’re going to have to undone it because they were taking six thousand dollars a share out of the Brackenridge Trust – just like stealing it. And so, to our surprise, in about day or two that deal was called off.
H: Well, let me back up just a minute. Were you retained by Harte-Hanks at that time?
O: No, I was not paid anything at that time.
H: Okay. And who was the ten thousand dollar a share offer from?
O: Harte-Hanks.
H: Okay. So they’d up their...the original was four thousand a share and...
O: To the Grice heirs.
H: Yeah. And then the next was ten thousand.
O: Ten thousand.
H: Okay.
O: And they also told the attorney general who wanted to know the value of the shares that they were worth ten thousand dollars a share. And I have telegrams to the attorney general and copies to me stating that they would pay then thousand dollars a share. So in effect, by the sale to Hennipen, there was a withdrawal or waste of six thousand dollars a share of the Brackenridge stock and wouldJesse Oppenheimer 14
O: have reduced the corpus of the Brackenridge Charitable Trust by sixty percent.
H: How many shares were involved in the trust? Do you recall?
O: I would have to check my file...
H: About.
O: It could have been three hundred and thirty-three and a third – something of that type. But I think there were a thousand shares outstanding. I think...I can check a file if you want to turn this off.
H: That’s okay.
O: All right. So anyway...so they called off that sale and Harte offered them ten thousand dollars a share for the Brackenridge Trust stock. And they sold it to him, and they then offered them their stock – their twenty-eight percent -at ten thousand dollars a share, and he bought it. So at that point Harte-Hanks became one hundred percent owners of the Express Publishing Company, because they had bought the Grice heirs’ block, they had bought the Brackenridge Charitable Trust block. And they later bought out the Huntresses, which the Huntresses really were smart to do ‘cause then they would have then been the minority twenty-eight percent because Harte would have controlled through his thirty-three and a third percent of Brackenridge and he would have controlled the Grice shares. So twenty-eightJesse Oppenheimer 15
O: percent would have been...the thing would have swung over to where the Huntresses...
H: Yeah, just the reverse.
O: ...were the minority.
H: Yeah.
O: So they wanted to get out, and they sold out. And before they sold out, or right after they sold out, both Huntresses resigned as board members of the trust, of the charitable trust.
H: And that was Frank Jr. and then...?
O: And his father, and his son.
H: Sons – Fritzi.
O: Yeah. The old man, I think, had died by then – the real old man.
H: Yes.
O: Who was my father’s age.
H: Yeah.
O: They resigned because they had no longer any motivation to be on this trust. And so I think Gilbert Denman and I have a record, and maybe McDaniels stayed on, I think. But then it was Leroy, Gilbert, McDaniels, and I forget – one other person who I have a record of here, that we can supplement any of this information.
H: And then what happened to the trust?
O: The trust has continued. It is now one of our community trusts. It...in the...if you look in theJesse Oppenheimer 16
O: Directory of Texas Foundations, on page fourteen of the sixteenth edition, 1996 – 1997, it shows assets nineteen million, two forty-two, four ten; income eight forty-nine thousand, four ninety-one; grants six hundred and seventy-five thousand nine thirty-five. It shows the trustees: Gilbert Denman, trustee; Leroy Denman, trustee; J.B. McDaniels Jr., trustees - so I guess he’s still a trustee - and John H. Moore, trustee. I don’t know who he is, but he may be connected in some way.
H: But it’s still in...
O: So it’s still in existence.
H: Well, it’s doing significantly more charitable distributions than it did in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
O: I would certainly hope so. [laughter]
H: Yeah. [laughter] Great.
O: I mean, now is evidently... However it’s still controlled by the same – the Denman family - because they have several of these charitable trusts that they like to control, such as this and, you know, the big one – the Halsell Trust and so forth.
H: As I recall, and I was in San Antonio at the time Harte-Hanks took control of the Express Publishing Company in the summer of 1962...
O: I think that’s about right; I don’t remember the...
H: I remember the sale was announced in June, and I think by August they’d taken it over.Jesse Oppenheimer 17
O: That could be. The offers were in ’62, and I presume that it was closed soon thereafter. I have some papers on that.
H: Yeah. I remember being delighted by the change in ownership.
O: These telegrams are dated in February of ’62, so I’ll presume that ’62 was the year that most of these were closed.
H: Yeah, it was.
O: At that time, when this telegram of offer was sent, the trustees were Frank G. Huntress Jr. and Frank G. Huntress the third, Leroy Denman and John B. McDaniel Jr. were the trustees.
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